Category Archives: Dave’s Muse

At the recent Chaos Communications Congress, Steven J. Murdoch, a researcher in the security group at the University of Cambridge, discussed how clock skew can be used to facilitate a digital attack against anonymity networks. Clock skew, the tendency for a computer’s clock to become less precise when heated, can reduce the efficacy of anonymizers, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Tor network.

Have you recently been receiving messages from a number of new friends? If so, you are either a good person or a one of the millions of spam victims. Experts estimate that 90% of e-mail traffic is spam, and those spammers claiming to be your friend may not really have your best interests at heart.

The United States Department of Defense and the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence today issued a joint news release announcing a electronic urban battlefield personnel and weapons transportation system, codenamed EUBPAWT (pronounced EUW-paw). The EUBPAWT system utilizes a high-energy quantum mechanical electrical field to quantify the quantum molecular structure of living tissue, which is then spatially transported and interstitially reconstituted.

Wikipedia, the popular online reference source for undergraduates and consumers, worldwide, has more than 15 times the number of articles than the well-known Encyclopedia Britannica, the self-proclaimed “world’s most indispensable and reliable reference resource.”

There are no traffic cops on the internet. Until now, that is. If U.S. telecommunication companies have their way, we may have internet traffic cops, patrol cars, and a full police union. The traffic cops will direct the traffic, giving preferential treatment to a select few that are able to pay for the unimpeded toll lane. Those who are able to pay the toll will get faster service.

The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service
(IERRSS) will move time backward one second on December 31, 2005. An
extra second will be added at the end of the year to to account for
the slowing of the Earth’s rotation. The IERRSS recognizes that our
planet’s pace of rotation is unpredictable, and will institute the
first leap second in seven years. Normally the leap second is a
nearly annual event.

University of Michigan researchers have developed the first scalable quantum computer chip using principally the same semiconductor manufacturing process as integrated semiconductor chips. The researchers have been able to trap and control a single atom within a processor chip.

Do you carry a cellphone? Do you know that your cellular service provider knows where your phone is? By extension, if you carry your phone with you, your cellular service provider knows where you are. Cellular phones can be located, accurate to within about 300 yards, whenever they are turned on. Since most cellular phone users keep their phones on and with them most of the time, it is quite probable that their ongoing whereabouts are being automatically tracked.

Mozilla Corporation, not the Mozilla Foundation, has released the Firefox 1.5, the latest incarnation of the wildly-popular open-source webbrowser. Using the new Gecko 1.8 rendering engine, the new version of Firefox is faster at interpreting HTML webpages and more stable when displaying pages that are created with nonstandard code.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment attempted to protect some of its music CDs from digital piracy by automatically installing copy protection software on the computers of users who attempted to play the music CDs on their computers. The security tool is a system root kit, and it restricts copying of the music on the CD. In response to a widespread outcry from consumers and security experts, Sony BMG Music Entertainment created a downloadable patch that will disable the root kit security program; however, the patch leaves the affected computer open to anyone’s downloading software to the computer.